You’ve heard about social media, you know you want to use social media, you have a budget for social media, but you need to know how to use social media marketing to help achieve your corporate marketing goals.

It’s an intimidating field because it’s so new and you know if a strategy is not clearly mapped out social media marketing initiatives can fail. But you can’t ignore it because you want to stay ahead of competitors, retain clients, manage your brand and monitor your space.

So where do you start? Follow these steps and you’ll be on your way to building a successful social media marketing strategy…

Step 1: Define goals and objectives

Clearly map out your corporation’s goals and objectives.

Is your goal to:

• Generate more brand awareness?
• Interact with prospects?
• Monitor competition?
• Monitor and manage your brand reputation?
• Generate awareness of your company’s services or offerings?
• Attract new employees, investors, partners/vendors?

Step 2: Pinpoint where your audience and potential evangelists are sharing information

Listen to what’s going on in your space and identify the thought leaders and ambassadors. Look at who you are currently communicating with and how, as well as with whom you want to interact. This will help you form a basis for everything else you do with social media tools. Identifying your audience before simply choosing convenient tools will lead to a much more successful social media campaign.

To help identify where/how your customers are sharing and consuming information online. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my target audience on social networking sites?
• Do they belong to specialized groups?
• Who are they interacting with?
• Which social media channels would be best to use for the type of content you have?

Step 3: Audit Resources

Once you have figured out what you would like to do with social media to achieve your corporate marketing goals, you have three options to execute your campaign: use current staff; hire employee(s); or outsource parts or all of your campaign to an outside vendor. You must consider the following when making your decision:

• Do I have existing content that I can re-purpose?
• Do my internal resources have existing knowledge on the platforms, and technologies needed to execute my campaign. How much is their “ramp up” going to cost my department in staff hours?
• What technology (portals, videos, platforms that enable user generated content, landing pages) do I need to develop? Which of these do I need to outsource?
• What monitoring tools do I have available?
• Who is going to fulfill the different social media marketing roles and responsibilities?

The Green Buzz Agency Blog provides insight for Marketing Decision Makers and other fun people   If you have insight on Marketing to share with our audience, contact us about being a Guest GBA Blogger. Or learn more about Washington DC based GBA and our video production prowess!

Step 4: Establish a social media protocol

A corporate social media protocol should be developed and employed to help companies feel comfortable about social media participation. A well-constructed protocol can help companies organize and prioritize goals, designate the individuals that should assume ownership of the brand’s online communications, while simultaneously ensuring that these communications broadcast messages that are consistent across all social media engagements.

To begin establishing a protocol, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What information do we want to keep private?
2. What kinds of information would we benefit from making public?
3. What personal social media use is appropriate? Inappropriate?
4. How will we measure which rules are helpful and which are not?
5. Who are our quality followers? How can we continually engage them?
6. Should we have a set of rules for proactive social media use? Reactive social media use?
7. How do we respond to positive engagement versus negative engagement?

Step 5: Start using social media

Now that you determined who you want to communicate with, who is going to accomplish your social media marketing initiatives, and where you want to go with the relationships, you can execute your plan.

Step 6: Measure results

You need to measure and monitor all activity. Be sure that you create mechanisms for feedback and input throughout your process to provide opportunities for your community, staff, etc. to share ideas and LISTEN!

Ask yourself these questions as you evaluate your social media efforts:

• Have your networks grown or changed? How?
• Are there new social media roles to explore?

• What worked?
• What can we do differently?
• What should we eliminate?
• How much time is spent on each social media initiative?
• How is social media changing right now?
• Are we ahead of our competitors?

If you want to use social media marketing in your overall marketing plan, you need a sound strategy. If you don’t have a sound strategy, you risk losing control of your brand, reputation, client base and prospects. If you do have one, you will have a huge advantage over competitors, have the ability to enforce or build a loyal client base, position your thought leaders as experts, develop interactive relationships with prospects, avoid potential pitfalls and have an overall stronger marketing plan.

-AJ Gerritson is Founding Partner and Social Media Strategist at 451 Marketing, a Boston-based communications agency that specializes in social media marketing, public relations, and creative development. For more information, please visit AJ’s LinkedIn Page.

Learn more about GBA and our video production prowess!

The GBA Blog provides insight for Marketing Decision Makers and other fun people

Angela Brown, Business Development Specialist at
Venable LLP is today’s guest blogger:

No matter where you are in your career or what industry you’re in, chances are you’re constantly being bombarded with the next big thing when it comes to marketing your brand.

The way that we work and communicate has changed so much that our attention spans are increasingly short and our brains are increasingly fried. We’re always on – tethered to BlackBerries and iPhones, checking emails from soccer games and taking conference calls from airport terminals.

Twenty-four-hour news cycles have given way to up-to-the-minute blog posts, and every time you think you’ve mastered the latest and greatest social networking tool, another one comes along and it’s time to play catch up.

Trying to establish or sustain a career in a challenging economy while staying on top of industry trends and living your life is a recipe for burnout. So you start to slip, and common courtesies and best practices go out the window. We’ve become so consumed with what’s next, we have forgotten the basics.

I’ve seen it everywhere lately. I see it when a disgruntled blogger posts about a pitch they received from an individual or company that clearly has no idea what they write about or who their audience is. I see it when I receive pitches for services I don’t need or don’t have the authority to buy. And I see it when people flock to social media sites, post once and never return.

The people and companies that make these mistakes have one thing in common – they are members of the “throw spaghetti at wall” school of thought, choosing to take action without direction in hopes that their efforts will stick. But stickiness is not a marketing strategy.

If you treat your marketing and branding efforts like spaghetti, you won’t get very far.

A sticky marketing approach will get you two things:

1. You will risk alienating your audience.
2. You and/or your brand will lose credibility.

To the first point, the worst thing about sticky marketing is that it’s self-serving. Sticky marketers are so consumed with their product, their service and what they believe to be newsworthy, that they give little consideration to the needs, wants or interests of the people on the other side. They’re looking inward and working backward.

Under ideal circumstances, the point of sale shouldn’t be your first encounter with a blogger, prospective client or consumer. From performing extensive market research to gain insight into consumer wants, needs and complaints, to monitoring blogs and commenting on posts prior to engaging the authors (and engaging them with relevance), what the marketing strategists behind the most successful businesses have in common is that they look outward with their efforts.

Savvy marketing strategists recognize the importance of understanding the needs of your audience first. Never assume that a prospect wants or needs what you have to offer because their name appeared in a search or on a list. Do your research, listen, establish and cultivate the relationship, and go from there. Every move you make should be client or prospect focused, and you must continue to nurture that relationship for the long term. They’ll thank you for it and tell their friends.

Going about it any other way sends the message that you can’t be bothered to tailor your approach to what your audience truly wants or needs, and there is no faster way to get them to write you off.

Loss of credibility is a natural byproduct of alienating your audience with a sticky marketing strategy. Credibility is based on trust, which is extremely difficult to gain if you don’t take the time that an outside-in marketing approach requires. And in the same way that a business can reap the benefits of word of mouth when it comes to a job well done, word gets around when you compromise credibility with the wrong person.

The proliferation of new media has given a new voice to consumers and influencers, and increased the speed with which they can sing your praises or verbally rake you over the coals. Choosing sticky marketing over a thoughtful, consumer-centric approach can make the difference between building a stable of loyal brand evangelists and having your brand skewered on a blog (or in the mainstream media). And when it comes to earning trust and building the lasting relationships that will carry your business forward, sticky marketing just doesn’t work.

There will always be new ways for us improve and change the way that we work, but we can’t forget the fundamentals. Save the spaghetti for supper.

Green Buzz Agency wants to thank Angela Brown for her great guest blog post!

To Contact Angela Email: angelabrown810@gmail.com

Learn more about GBA and our video production prowess!